There are more than a few arresting things about Monty Python's 1983 film The Meaning of Life: Martin Luther as a pederast; a birth scene where the machine that goes ping is balanced by a cleaver-wielding doctor; the morbidly obese Mr Creosote exploding after gorging in a restaurant; and Michael Palin's earnest Catholic father singing to his children that ''if a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate''.

But possibly the most startling thing about the film is how even after 30 years, the work of the six men (five British and one American) can still shock and disturb even as you laugh.

I just took the parts that nobody else wanted to do.

''I think we designed the film to shock people, so I'm glad to hear that," says a typically good-humoured Terry Jones, the Python who directed The Meaning of Life and and co-directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

"Though when Mike [Palin] sang the song to the children we substituted the word sock for cock so he says there's a rubber thing on the end of my sock and we redubbed it later."

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Even discounting such catering for the sensibilities of children, the film, the last to be made by the Pythons as a whole, wasn't just out to shock. It had a visual and production ambition far from the cheap sketches of their first film a decade earlier when Jones, Palin, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam and Graham Chapman essentially transferred the TV show sketches to the bigger screen for And Now for Something Completely Different.

Jones, who co-directed with Gilliam, had grand plans, as is obvious from Every Sperm is Sacred, a big-production number in the mould of the musical film Oliver!

''We had the wherewithal to do that," says Jones. "I think the budget was $8 million or something like that so we had the budget to spread our wings a bit – The Holy Grail was shot on £150,000."

Interestingly, while more elaborate and expensive than its predecessors, The Meaning of Life was not exponentially bigger at the box office.

''I think it had less impact, perhaps because we went back to the sketch formula," Jones says. "Certainly with the things everybody quotes, in the UK it's The Life of Brian and in the US it's The Holy Grail. But I still think of certain episodes from the film that in my mind are clearer than the TV shows."

Actually, Jones admits, he'd be useless at those parties where over-lubricated Python fans can bore relentlessly with repetitions of their favourite skits from the TV show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, and the four films.

''I couldn't do any Monty Python routines,'' he says jovially. ''I couldn't remember them." Though he does recite, with almost total recall, a skit he wrote for The Frost Report (an early training ground for almost all the Pythons) that pre-dates Flying Circus by at least three or four years.

As it is, Jones doesn't need to remember the best moments of his career; we're doing it for him. The 30th anniversary of this film is being marked by a Blu-ray release with a new documentary, but it's not as though we have been short of commemorative events for Monty Python during the past 20 years, with several career retrospectives, anniversary re-releases of the TV show and films and, of course, individual milestones and even Palin's diaries.

In this ongoing history Jones, always among the most affable of the troupe and, along with Palin, the whimsical but equally absurd counterweight to the more acerbic writing pair of Cleese and Chapman, has become used to the questions and is familiar with the answers.

''I'm very proud of the films, though you do go on to automatic pilot sometimes – you don't know what you're saying really,'' he says with a chuckle.

While we are in confessional mode, I tell him that some of my earliest formative experiences and "understanding" of women came via the Pythons, and in particular, Jones's portrayal of women.

''Oh dear,'' he says. ''Oh dear, that's very bad news. I think we were a bit sexist. My 'pepper pot' [his standard doughty working-class woman – for example, Brian's mother in The Life of Brian] used to look extremely like my mum. So maybe that's a good thing.''

Jones, it could be said, made some of the best or worst women. Is that a legacy to be proud of?

''I just took the parts that nobody else wanted to do," he laughs again. "I suppose I've got a feminine side but I like women too much. I like their company and I like being married to one."

Monty Python's The Meaning of Life Blu-ray 30th anniversary edition is out now